Realistic and idealistic Americans each have a plausible reason to dislike the fake news phenomenon, however they define it. For the idealists, fake news simply does not belong in the temple of professional media. A fraudulent interloper, it must be tossed out as a matter of principle. Realists focus on the adverse effects of fake news — warping public perceptions, scrambling public reason, and inviting spreading mischief. Both these perspectives have an intuitive validity to them. But they’re missing something important: fake news doesn’t really work the way they fear.

Evidence suggests that fake news doesn’t make much of an impact on consumers, even though it’s increasingly difficult — and not just because the fakers are clever — to distinguish fake news from real.

A new academic study conducted by professors at Dartmouth, Princeton, and Exeter Universities, for instance, has shown that “dubious political content online is disproportionately likely to reach heavy news consumers who already have strong opinions, as Brendan Nyhan, the Dartmouth researcher, concluded in the New York Times. That is, the least persuadable people are the ones where fake news lands the most.

What’s more, Nyhan notes, fake news has a far smaller exposure than people think. The infamous Russian bots on Twitter “represented only 1 percent of all election-related tweets and 0.5 percent of views of election-related tweets.”

Well, if fake news isn’t nearly as threatening to the moral or practical integrity of the media, why does it still cause such a stir — and what deeper reason might some people have to be afraid?

There are at least a few possible answers. Maybe fake news is apt to push people already at a political extreme into even further-flung territory. But the most outlandish claims — ridiculous conspiracy theories, flat-earth claims, and the like — flourish outside the mainstream media, not within it. And the most “extremist” of content that penetrates the mainstream online isn’t phony information but bigoted provocation.

Perhaps the real problem with fake news is that it has greatly fostered a new, more reality-based public perception of all news and all media.

It’s not that more and more people now see the whole news media through jaded and disenchanted postmodern glasses. Americans are still pretty strongly disinclined to believe that truth is just a construct and so-called reality a mere simulacrum.

No, it’s that growing numbers of thoughtful and passionate Americans are beginning to wake up to the fact that consuming more news seems to result in decreasing benefits. News isn’t going to save us. If we want to matter more, in our own lives and the lives of others, consuming a lot of news is a bad way to do it.

Today, social media overload is leading many to realize that the intense investment that has to be made in an effort to attract attention is a losing game, one which even prominent celebrities are losing. That experience is helping people understand how fruitless and wasteful it is to plow the same kind of endless effort into consuming a large amount of news, especially social news.

Leave aside the question of how much time now has to be put into figuring out just how fake is the news being presented to you — even if you had a big diet of perfectly true and relevant news, how much would that pattern of consumption actually help you bring ballast, purpose, and consequence to your life in a rewarding way? The blatant trend is toward accurately observing that the answer is: not a whole lot.

The fake news phenomenon isn’t primarily a problem because it’s destroying the credibility or integrity of news, but because it’s accelerating awareness that news of any kind is making too great a claim on our attention.

This is not to say “everyone” is going to “stop reading the news.” It’s certainly not to argue that ignorance is bliss. An impending collapse of the news attention economy suggests two much different things. First, the biggest and best news providers will consolidate and retain both casual and dedicated readers, while lesser outlets battle for diminishing scraps. Second, people whose news media consumption patterns trend toward a minimum viable amount of the most relevant information will gain a significant advantage in life efficacy and richness over those whose patterns trend toward maxing out consumption.

There’s reason to believe that some of the efficacy and richness gained will be invested in recreationally consuming not particularly newsy information. The media industry as we know it tends toward maxing out content production because that’s seen as the most (or only) effective way of supporting a prosperous class of media elites. The great fear in the media industry is that its prestigious and influential elite will be destroyed if content consumption crashes. (A secondary fear, found among the industry rank and file, is that their jobs will be destroyed first.) So we should expect competition around delivering “must-consume” non-newsy information will increase.

But we should also expect that people will also increasingly consume non-newsy content in a minimum-viable way too — with the definition of “must-consume” content continuing to shift toward content that fits niche interests and identities. That kind of content could be especially attractive if it helps inspire or organize thinking around using the “extra” time freed up by decreasing media consumption to reclaim more active personal agency in the real world.

That would make our world a lot more human and a lot more reality-based. But it will come along with greater complexity and conflict. Fake news is probably such a hot topic because it’s stirring our dawning awareness of this more muscular world to come.

James Poulos is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group.

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